Sunday, 8 June 2014

To move forward, you need to backup. Backing up your production data is critical and with Postgresql, you can backup WAL (Write Ahead Log) archives and this post gives you steps to accomplish for backing up postgresql WALs to Amazon S3 on your OpenShift Origin using WAL-E.

WAL-E is a great tool that simplifies backup of postgresql by performing continuous archiving of PostgreSQL WAL files and base backups. Enough blabbering, you can reach out technical docs on how WAL works. I'll just mention series of commands and steps necessary for sending WAL archives to AWS S3 bucket.

On the node containing application with postgresql cartridge, run the following commands:

Then, edit the postgresql configuration file so as to turn on wal archiving. You need to find the right container for your postgresql in /var/lib/openshift (Its quite trivial if you know OpenShift basics).